Dave Solomon of Sysinternals was experimenting about how many services are necessary for at least basic funtionality of Windows. What he discovered, however is that Windows can be perfectly used for almost all basic use, such as web browsing or running aplications, without any services running. In his article he explains how to achieve this. Apparently even Microsoft's own vice president of the Core Operating Systems Division was surprised about this.

hardly news.. I've been doing this for years on my boxes.. between manually editing thing in the registry, disabling all the services cept the few you might need for something, using nlite and xplite plus a few otehr apps.. xp can run nicely

xp will run fine on a fast 486 with enough ram. It can run usably on a p133/32mb (its using 19mb on that system right now...)...

While the rest of your statements is true, this must be crap that you never tested yourself, right?

XP will not install on anything less than a Pentium-1.

For further "windows on extremely crappy hardware" tests, see: http://www.winhistory.de/more/386/xpmini.htm [in german, but you get the idea: it is possible to run XP on a 20Mhz P1 with 32 MB RAM - way below Microsoft's stated minimum hardware requirements]